http://www.salon.com...l_make_us_better/

'Tis a pity that no ballet Co. of which I'm aware has seen fit to do a recent re-run of The Green Table
(Yeah Wiki et al will fill you in, if this is unknown)
I see.. I See.. the rictus/horrible-cynical masks of the 'diplomats' gesticulating at each other/then the scenes of the consequences of yet another impasse ... more expendable dead ones.

Meanwhile..

I want American foreign policy to fail
Drones, wiretapping foreign leaders, NSA out of control: Change will only come when our foreign policy truly fails
BY PATRICK L. SMITH


It is difficult, and it will never be any other, to be an American and write in an American publication that the best thing to befall our great country would be a series of resounding defeats. It is upside down. It is bitter. And it is time.

Failure will make Americans a better people, their country a more humane country, and the world a more habitable world. This the only honest conclusion to draw as the outlines of official American thinking in the 21st century emerge from the mists of endemic misinformation.

Let us ask ourselves: What do the following developments, all now in the news, commonly reflect? Why is it better to view them all at once, parts of a single phenomenon, rather than separately (as our media incessantly encourage us to do)?

We now have friendly heads of state telling off President Obama for tapping their telephone lines (the French, the Germans, the Spanish), canceling state visits (the Brazilians, the Mexicans), and — this just in — threatening American ambassadors with expulsion (the European Union). And the only argument Washington and the American media can marshal is that others do it, too (which is very frail logic and simply not so, in any case). Fair to say, the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs have now alienated most of the human race.
A new report on drones by Amnesty International, coincident with another by Human Rights Watch, says those responsible for the CIA’s secret-but not-secret use of these lethal machines could plausibly be tried as war criminals. Fair and scary question: At whose office door does this corridor end? The numbers are blurry by intent, but the best independent estimates (the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, TBIJ, a London operation) tell us we are now counting innocent casualties well into four figures. Not to worry: Drones “will likely remain the administration’s weapon of choice” (language just published in Foreign Affairs) because they are cheap and do not require Americans to watch other Americans get killed for no one knows quite what.
Let us be frank: Trade pacts are nobody’s idea of a good time. But it is worth looking more closely at what Washington is up to across both oceans in our names — if not in our interests. Talks to establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership and an EU–U.S. Free Trade Agreement are both fated to end in tears, precisely because of their primary intent: to impose Anglo-American neoliberalism on everybody, or — great phrase on the radio the other night — “to dollarize the world economy.” In its potential consequences, “globalization” as “Americanization” is as diabolic as the things noted in bullet points 1 and 2 above. Saving grace, daring prediction: Count on it, the French will never eat Velveeta.
It is hard to sit still as this stuff flows through our newsrooms. The war against the individual sovereignty of every person everywhere, the deadly war against law, diplomacy and coexistence, the war against authentic culture and values that arise from each society’s soil: American victories in each case would be calamitous. Failure is the only sustainable outcome — the best to be hoped for.

[. . .]

Untamed spookery, diabolic weapons and prosecutorial trade arrangements to be forced down others’ gullets as if they were geese tell us all about ourselves and our plans. In any choice between primacy or world order — the prescient coinage of Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard historian of the Cold War — Washington insists on the former. It continues to choose the unilateralism of the last century over the multilateralism that is the unmistakable sine qua non of our time. Military hardware and territorial dominion — 20th century technologies — trump coexistence and the mahogany tables of diplomacy, which are the technologies of our time.

The strategic goals remain dominance and control — nothing new. And beneath these lie old, very old compulsions and fears. Security has been an obsession since a young, rather naively idealistic nation looked out at the cynical despots of old Europe. The NSA now gives us the security neurosis at its furthest (one hopes) extreme: It is insatiable and has long since produced insecurity in job lot volumes.

Dominance and control are — shorthand here, but it will do — perversions of the older idea of providential mission and our trusty belief in our exceptional status. The original thought was rooted in myth and never sturdy; all that remains of it are the defense budgets, the apparently limitless espionage apparatus, and a desire to project not democracy but mere power.

[. . .]